NewsletterEducation in Sleep Medicine in Germany Penzel, Thomas, 5/1/2007The German Sleep Society professionalized its services by introducing a number of quality improvements in sleep medicine. The first one was sleep center accreditation. This aims to set criteria for high and standardized quality for sleep centers. This relates to equipment, room settings, and structural components. The second quality issue was education. This aims to establish criteria and tests for sleep physicians and sleep technicians. More details are given here. The third quality issue aims at procedural and results of patient care. The assessment of this is done by a review of patient records and by questionnaires given to the patients diagnosed and treated in sleep centers.

Insomnia is a very common complaint among the general population of adults around the world [1,2]. Despite this high prevalence, insomnia is however still unrecognizedby health professionals. One issue stands in the fact that insomnia is frequently considered as a symptom rather than as a true disease and is not clear for practitioners if it could be a symptom and a disease. Another difficulty is that it is often difficult for patients and for health professionals to understand when insomnia is severe enough to need a treatment. Then there is still insufficient knowledge about the management of insomnia. In the last decade several consensus meetings about insomnia, its recognition, diagnosis and treatment have been made [3-8], all these consensus groups have underlined the impact of insomnia on public health and the need to better encompass the consequences of insomnia on work, economics and quality of life. There is however very few international data comparing insomnia in the population of different countries around the planet.

The aim of this contribution is describe carefully the epidemiological issues of insomnia and its public health consequences and to point out what are the certitudes and the missing data we need for a better comprehension of the impact of insomnia in the daily lives of patients.

Sleep education in Italy has a long story that begins in the1980s, when the national pioneers of clinical sleep research started to meet annually in what was naturally denominated the SLEEP CLUB. Every year, for three intensive days, two members of the main sleep labs distributed throughout the Italian territory attended the meeting sponsored by a drug company that was always organized in a comfortable resort in order to strengthen the contacts between the participants and provide plenty of time to discuss the programmed issues. In 1991 that experience offered the conditions for the origin of the Italian Association of Sleep Medicine (AIMS).

World Sleep Society is located in the United States.

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